TAXING EXERCISE — The birthday of the federal income tax was just a few days ago. Shall we have a party?

Maybe we could decorate a cake, put on some funny hats. toot some horns and blow out some candles. And, instead of playing pin the tail on the donkey, we could all take turns throwing darts at a map of Wyoming.

That’s because Wyoming was the state that made the income tax official. In 1913, Wyoming became the 36th state to ratify the 16th — or Income Tax — Amendment, making it the law of the land (“The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes.”).

That’s why you’re now engaged in obtaining your W-2 form and trying to remember where you put all those receipts from last year and attempting to make sense out of all the stuff on Form 1040.

One line, in particular, has always intrigued me — the one that provides a space for entering “Embezzled or other illegal income.”

It would seem like only a crook with the IQ of cauliflower would enter a sum in that space. So why is it there?

It’s there, I learned, because one of the feds’ favorite ways to nail elusive crooks is through income tax evasion; that “embezzled” space prevents them from claiming they didn’t know they were supposed to report shady income.

And if, say, a blackmailer was actually stupid enough to report his ill-gotten gains on Form 1040, would the IRS blow the whistle on him? In a twinkling, researcher Cedric Adams says: